The Best Light Recipe

The editors of Cook's Illustrated

The Best Light Recipde If you've never read Cook's Illustrated, here's a primer. The magazine contains no advertising. It reviews cookware products such as baking sheets and nonstick pans. But its main thing is testing recipes in an effort to come up with the best possible result—in a way that's actually feasible for the home cook. Obviously, this doesn't always mean the healthiest way to cook something.

This particular cookbook, however, does strive for lower-fat, lower-calorie, lower-sodium recipes that nevertheless taste good. So in this case, instead of starting with a bunch of standard recipes for something, they start with a bunch of light recipes. They try them out, assess what doesn't really work, then go back to a good non-light version, and try to work down to a healthier one that is better.

The subtitle of the book is "Would you make 58 light cheesecakes to find one you'd actually want to eat? We did. Here are 300 lower fat recipes that put flavor first."

In some cases, they report, they had to give up; for example, there is no low-fat pie crust recipe in here. But there are plenty of recipes in all categories, from appetizers to desserts. In each case, as in their magazine, they include details of their odyssey to achieve the final result. If you're into food, this is kind of interesting reading in itself, but it also often serves to let you know what will happen if you're tempted to skip a step or substitute an ingredient. Chocolate chips instead of baking chocolate in the brownies? They'll be dry! Reducing the amount of sweet potato to cooking liquid? Expect runny instead of creamy!

I've tried several recipes in the book, and have generally been pleased with the results. I must say the desserts are particularly impressive; it is the first time that I've made a light brownie that has the dense chocolate texture of the full-fat version, or a light chocolate chip cookie with a crisp cookie, not soft cakey, texture.

In other cases, achieving a healthier version doesn't seem such a great achievement; a chicken stir-fry or shrimp salad isn't normally be that fattening anyway. But here as well, I've been led to new techniques that really do seem to produce better results, such as cooking shrimp by adding it to water that had been boiling for two minutes, and letting it sit in their for 8. This produced shrimp that fully cooked without being dried out or infected with the off-flavour they sometimes pick up from stir-frying.

The tricky is not taking the tempting shortcut—and sometimes I just can't resist. But even here, I've found the recipes forgiving, with the results still quite tasty despite the partial ingredient substitution or shortened step.